Although global smartphone shipments fell in 2020, Apple bucked that trend, increasing its global shipment rate by over 10% when compared to the previous year, says a new report by DigiTimes Research.
The report says global smartphone shipments dropped by 8.8% to 1.24 billion units in 2020, due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. However, 5G-enabled smartphones reached as high as 280-300 million units in 2020, up from the 20 million units shipped a year earlier.
Of the top six smartphone brands, only Apple and Xiaomi managed to increase shipments in 2020 over 2019. Meanwhile, Samsung and Huawei were hit the hardest in 2020, seeing their shipments dip by a double-digit rate.
In the first quarter of 2020, global shipments “dove over 20% on year in the first quarter of 2020, fell by a double-digit rate in the second, and narrowed the decline to a single digit in the third, before staging a single-digit rebound in the fourth,” according to the DigiTimes‘ report.
Research conducted by Omdia showed Apple’s iPhone 11 was the most-shipped smartphone in the first half of 2020, making it the most popular handset last year. The Cupertino phone maker shipped an estimated 37.7 million iPhone 11 units in 2020, that is an increase of 10.8 million units over last year’s top-selling iPhone XR.